Maybe There’s More to Life than HBO

Probably the weirdest Emmy reaction I shouldn’t really have been surprised by comes from TV Guide‘s Michael Schneider, who wonders if HBO is “Losing Its Touch” because it only won nineteen Emmys this year.

To be fair, ABC Modern Family broke HBO’s eight-year streak at the Primetime Emmys, winning five awards on Sunday to edge out HBO’s four. But HBO’s total still puts it on top for the awards overall, and the supporting actor win for Game of Thrones was one of the big surprises of the night.

It takes some serious acrobatics to turn that into a story about a network that’s losing it’s edge. When discussing Boardwalk Empire‘s “heartbreaker” on Sunday, Schneider is reduced to saying that the show — the most-awarded of the year, with eight Emmys overall — came one Emmy short of tying The West Wing‘s nine-win record. Pathetic, right?

Sensibly, Schneider goes on to pin much of the blame on the Emmys’ choice to merge the movie and miniseries categories this year, even though it totally undercuts his thesis. This decision put HBO films like Too Big to Fail in competition with Downton Abbey, though I don’t see how that’s HBO’s fault. Are we supposed to imagine that if Too Big to Fail had been mind-blowingly awesome enough, the TV Academy would have kept the categories separate just so HBO would win?

What the developments really tell us is that HBO’s dominance at the Emmys has depended a lot on a lack of competition — particularly a category where virtually all its competition were failed backdoor pilots and the likes of Sharktopus. HBO makes terrific movies, but it helps a lot when the other networks aren’t even trying.

I do have reservations about the idea of merging the categories, because I don’t really like rewarding the networks for their lack of ambition. Plus, there’s a lot to the argument that the creative effort that goes into production of a TV movie is meaningfully different from what it takes to make a miniseries — certainly the storytelling isn’t the same.

Still, the other networks really have been upping their game. AMC, which wasn’t making original shows 10 years ago, now has two shows that make regular Emmy appearances, and Mad Men arguably deserved more awards than it got. The fact that it lost three of those awards to broadcast shows — Friday Night Lights (twice!) and The Good Wife — shows that the amount of quality storytelling is on its way up across the board.

This might be HBO’s fault, tangentially. But mostly it’s a function of the fact that DVDs and on-demand and iTunes and Netflix and Hulu have made it easier to tell continuing stories on television. A show with a strong story arc was a novelty ten years ago, but it’s become so normalized that even CBS is getting into the game. HBO’s model allowed them to get there first, but now everybody else is catching up.

Basically, HBO isn’t getting worse — everybody else is getting better. That’s a good thing — it means there’s more good TV out there, and the Emmys are actually interesting sometimes. Well, not the show itself. And it’s a lot harder to decide what to watch. But still, I think we come out of this one ahead.

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